Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. Despite all the glitter and extravgance, Scott would always describe himself as a…
Category: Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, The Land of Cockaigne and Gastronomic Utopias
This article explores thematic parallels between The Great Gatsby, Joyce’s Ulysses, and myths like the Land of Cockaigne. It examines motifs of abundance, identity, and longing, reflecting on how literature reinterprets recurring myths of paradise, excess, and the sea. The essay connects Gatsby’s parties to ancient banquets and discusses how these works mirror and refract…
Who Turned The Great Gatsby into an Allegory of the American Dream? Podcast
“Gatsby, may be taken not only as an individual character but also as a symbolic or even allegorical character. It comes to seem more and more plausible that Gatsby, divided between power and dream, is to be thought of as standing for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream…
Absolution — F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby’s Forgotten Prologue
Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’t fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is…
The Phantom of the Jazz Age
The Phantom of the Jazz Age – 100 Years of Gatsby It’s 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. Jay Gatsby has followed the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paris determined to uncover the truth about his identity. Is Scott prepared to tell everybody the truth after all these years? Although a fictional scene,…
The Glorious Fourth – A Writer’s Declaration. A Listenable 10-page storybook
At 10.00am yesterday morning I received an email prompt from Google asking me to check out a new A.I feature called Gemini Storybook. I was busy proofing a book that I am writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, but curious, I took a look. And I’m glad I did. It was fun to use. Here’s the…
A ‘Secret Mission’ to Russia. How F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly became a spy.
In 1917, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was nearly recruited for a covert mission to Russia, posing as a Red Cross secretary for Father Sigourney Fay. The mission, tied to US State Department interests during the Russian Revolution, aimed to gauge religious freedom and political shifts. Complicated by secret diplomacy and escalating…
Katharine Gotzian Tighe Fessenden — Proofing Paradise
Listen the podcast discussion of the article: After quitting his job in New York and returning to his parents’ house in Saint Paul in July 1919, the 23 year-old Scott Fitzgerald was getting down to work on a new version of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, that had a bit more order, and…
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — The Great…
The Washingtons. The role played by the descendants of the family of George Washington in the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Among the mourners at the funeral of Scott’s grandmother, Cecilia Aston Scott Fitzgerald, in 1924 were the Forrest family, a distinguished Washington family whose ancestral home in Georgetown, Cecilia had stayed at during her early years in the capital. The head of the Forrest family was well-known government attorney Randolph Keith Forrest, the nephew of…